A shower and a fried-egg sandwich went a little way to easing the frustrations of the day. Alice had retired to her bedroom to do her homework, and seemed completely unfazed by recent events. Picking up the evening paper, Carlyle flopped on to the sofa beside his wife. ‘What a day!’
Helen finished sending a text message and dropped her phone on the coffee-table. ‘Well, at least there was no bomb. Apparently a couple of the older girls called it in.’
Carlyle gave her one of his many bemused looks. ‘Huh?’
‘They were due to have a test. They didn’t want to do the test, so
…’
‘So they said that there was a bomb in the bloody school?’ he spluttered.
‘Yes.’ Helen grinned.
He half-laughed. ‘Well, I suppose that’s using your initiative, kind of.’
‘But sadly for them,’ Helen continued, ‘one of the girls used her mobile to call it in. They are soooo busted.’
‘Jesus. How do you know all this so quickly?’
Helen tapped her nose with a finger. ‘The mothers’ network is always first with the news.’
‘Very impressive.’
‘There’s more.’
‘There is?’
‘Yes.’ Helen’s face darkened. ‘The sniffer dogs didn’t find any bombs, but they did come up with eight bags containing drugs.’
‘What kind of drugs?’ Carlyle asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Dope, presumably.’
‘What about that skunk stuff?’ Helen asked. ‘Isn’t that the new super-threat to the nation’s teens?’
‘Only if you’re a neurotic middle-class parent,’ Carlyle yawned, ‘happy to throw a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc down your throat every night while lecturing your kids about how they shouldn’t even look at a spliff.’
Helen regarded him thoughtfully. Normally she was the more liberal side of the relationship. When it came to drugs, however, her husband’s laissez-faire fatalism made her more than a little uncomfortable.
‘Basically,’ Carlyle continued, on a roll now, ‘it’s all the same stuff. You either use it or you abuse it. Some people can handle it; some people can’t. I’ll ask around in the morning, see what I can find out.’
‘Okay. That would be good. One of the bags belonged to a girl in Alice’s class.’
That stopped him in his tracks. ‘You’re kidding!’
His wife shot him a look that indicated that she most definitely wasn’t. ‘I don’t think she’s one of Alice’s friends but, still, we’ll have to keep a close eye on things.’
‘Yes,’ Carlyle agreed, moving swiftly from the realms of the theoretical to the pragmatic, ‘we will.’ He leaned across and pulled Helen towards him. For a while they just lay there, each of them thinking about their daughter and about the dangers ahead; each knowing also that there wasn’t really anything that they could do about it right now. You just had to wait and see how things turned out.
Finally Helen moved things on. ‘How was your day?’
‘Well…’ Carlyle sighed. He talked her through the story of Agatha and Henry Mills, or at least as much of it as he knew.
‘Will the case be closed tomorrow?’ she asked.
‘I hope so. We’ll see what Mr Mills has to say for himself in the morning.’ Henry Mills had been left to stew in the cells overnight. While Carlyle had been chasing around after his daughter, Joe had seen the man later that afternoon. Mills had stuck to his story that he had been fast asleep when someone had been practising their forehand smash with a frying pan on the back of his wife’s head. Exasperated, Carlyle had made it clear to the lawyer that they would charge him in the morning. Mills’s passivity was curious, but people reacted to stressful situations in different ways. Carlyle thought he might just be shutting down, trying to keep the outside world at bay. He decided to send in a psychologist to see what they made of the man. If nothing else, it would give a clear sign to Mills, and his lawyer, that they were curious about the state of his mental health. If the lawyer was sufficiently switched on, she would realise that the police weren’t buying her client’s story, but that they would probably be willing to do a deal on the grounds of diminished responsibility or something similar.
The inspector didn’t see the point of long sentences for domestic cases; it wasn’t as if the killers were a threat to the wider public, and it cost a fortune to keep them in jail. Far better that Mills’s lawyer got him to take a five-year deal, and the whole thing got wrapped up now. That way, he would probably be out in less than three. The alternative would be to go through the protracted, convoluted and hugely expensive legal process. If he did that, Mills would probably get eight to ten. There was a chance that he might get off on either a technicality or a jury’s sympathy vote but, if they were doing their job, the lawyer would tell him that it wasn’t worth the risk, or the hassle. Even if he won, he would still end up spending more than a year in custody, given the painfully slow speed at which the wheels of British justice manage to turn.
For Carlyle, the length of the sentence was an irrelevance. A win was a win. And a quick win was the best kind of all. Once guilt was confirmed, the case was closed. Nine times out of ten, he didn’t really care what happened beyond that.
Trying to forget about Henry Mills for a while, Carlyle returned to the evening paper. As usual, he read the sports pages first. Finding nothing of interest, he turned to the front. On page four his eye caught a story about an advert that the British Humanist Association had placed on the side of some of London’s red buses, proclaiming: There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life. Carlyle, a devout atheist, immediately took offence at the word ‘probably’. ‘These bloody lentil-sucking, sandal-wearing, liberal do-gooders,’ he harrumphed to himself under his breath. ‘Why can’t they just tell it like it is? There is no bloody God. End of story. If people could just acknowledge that basic fact, everyone’s life would become a lot easier.’ Almost willing himself to get more annoyed, he read on: A spokesman said: ‘This campaign will make people think — and thinking is anathema to religion.’ Bollocks it will, thought Carlyle sourly. If you are stupid enough to believe in God, what good is a bloody slogan on the side of a sodding bus?
Feeling his cheeks colouring, he looked imploringly at Helen, who was still curled up on the other end of the sofa. Well aware of the warning signs whenever her husband started winding himself up, she studiously ignored him, saying nothing and keeping her eyes firmly fixed on the television. She was watching that show where various ‘celebrities’ are dropped into the Australian jungle and made to debase themselves for a couple of weeks to no apparent purpose.
A serious woman in most other respects, Helen was addicted to junk television, and it drove Carlyle mad. This programme had to be one of the worst. He felt the urge to flee the room, but lacked the energy to haul himself off the sofa. His eyes were drawn back to the screen where a mound of bamboo worms were wriggling on a large plate which had been placed in front of one of the contestants. There was a close-up of the man’s disgusted face, as a worm was waved in front of him by one of the grinning presenters. Carlyle’s mouth fell open. ‘Christ!’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s Luke Osgood!’
‘ Sir Luke Osgood,’ Helen corrected him, reminding him of the former Metropolitan Police Chief’s recent knighthood. The gong had helped to soften the blow of his very messy and very public sacking by the Mayor of London a year or so earlier.
‘What the hell’s he doing in the jungle?’ Carlyle spluttered.
‘He’s got to eat all of those worms on the plate in three minutes or no one in the competition gets anything to eat tonight.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Carlyle, hating it when Helen tried to be funny like this, ‘but what’s he doing there in the first place?’
‘This is part of his reinvention as an all-round media performer,’ Helen said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for the man who had been Britain’s top policeman for five years to be conducting himself in such an appalling manner.
Carlyle studied the screen intently. The man currently stuffing bamboo worms into his mouth bore only a limited resemblance to the haggard bureaucrat who had been last seen leaving New Scotland Yard by the back door, hounded by journalists, with the scorn of his political masters ringing in his ears. Osgood’s previously messy hair had been cut short, bleached (to hide the grey) and spiked with gel. He sported a tan that bordered on orange and, although it was hard to tell on the television, Carlyle thought that there was a suggestion of some plastic surgery to remove the lines around his eyes and to make his lips fuller. ‘His mid-life crisis just gets worse,’ he sneered.
As Commissioner, Osgood had never impinged much on Carlyle’s working life, but his subsequent behaviour had caused some surprise. Barely two months after getting the sack, he left his wife and kids, announced that he was bisexual, and set up home with a twenty-five-year-old ballroom dancer who had arrived in London from Bergamo. Now the ‘pink policeman’ had a weekly column in a Sunday newspaper, and seized every opportunity to go on television or the radio to criticise Christian Holyrod, the Mayor who had sacked him, or else his former colleagues and his successor, Sir Chester Forsyth-Walker, a self-proclaimed ‘copper from the old school’.
Carlyle didn’t know anyone on The Job who didn’t think Osgood should have just taken his money, a pension pot of?3 million, and disappeared into the sunset with his mouth firmly shut and his newfound sexuality kept firmly hidden in the closet. How can anyone get to fifty and suddenly decide that they’re gay? For once, Carlyle found that he was in step with the majority view of the rank and file across London’s police stations, which was that Osgood could have no complaints if someone was to drag him down a dark alley and kick the living shit out of him for being such a pathetic, ego-crazed tosser.
‘They’ve got his boyfriend waiting for him at a nearby hotel,’ Helen replied. ‘He’s quite cute.’
Carlyle frowned. ‘Luke Osgood? Cute?’
‘No!’ Helen giggled. ‘The boyfriend. He’s called Gianluca.’ She arched her eyebrows theatrically. ‘Quite the Italian stallion.’
Carlyle chose to ignore his wife’s professed admiration for the hunky Gianluca, keeping his focus on Osgood, who was now well on the way to finishing his wormy snack. ‘But why is he bothering with all this?’ he asked. ‘He can’t need the money.’
‘I think he’s got a taste for it.’
Carlyle frowned again. ‘For what? Worms?’
‘No,’ Helen gave him a firm poke with her foot, ‘for being a celeb. His ego is finally being allowed to run free. He’s unleashed his frivolous side after a lifetime of being submerged in the system.’
‘I see,’ said Carlyle. He made a grab for her foot, but she pulled it away. ‘Just be happy that I manage to stay submerged in the system. Letting my ego run free wouldn’t put any bread on the table.’
‘If you could make as much money as Sir Luke,’ Helen grinned, ‘you have my permission to eat as many bugs as you like. You can even take an Italian boyfriend.’
Carlyle gave her a funny look.
‘Only joking. But there’s plenty of money in all this for Lucky Luke. Apparently, he’s getting paid a hundred and twenty thousand to do this show. With all his other work, he’s making something like three-quarters of a million a year now.’
‘Jeez.’ Carlyle let out a long, low whistle. Seven hundred and fifty thousand would be three times what Osgood was getting as Metropolitan Police Commissioner. What a world, he thought; what a fucking stupid world. You could earn?250,000 a year, be responsible for 50,000 people and a budget of?3.5 billion, not to mention having to deal with the politicians and all their crap — or, indeed, the safety of some 7 million Londoners. Alternatively, you could triple your money for sitting about talking rubbish and eating worms. He had to admit that it was not really such a difficult decision. ‘But what about his dignity?’ he asked lamely.
‘What about it?’ Helen snorted, tiring of the repeated interruptions. ‘How much did he have left when the Mayor sacked him? Anyway, how much is your dignity worth?’
Carlyle didn’t need to think about it for long to conclude that the answer was a lot less than?750,000. ‘God, all that cash! Could you imagine?’
‘Don’t feel too bad about it,’ Helen said. She gave him another poke with her toe, but this time it was gentler. ‘Osgood’s only got a limited window of opportunity.’ She disengaged her foot from his ribs and waved it at the screen. ‘How many times can he do stuff like this? It’s downhill all the way from here.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Carlyle.
‘Before you know it,’ Helen said, ‘he’ll be reduced to selling security shutters on late-night TV.’
‘And opening supermarkets in Croydon,’ Carlyle laughed.
‘Do they do that sort of thing any more?’ Helen asked.
‘I dunno,’ said Carlyle. ‘You would assume so. Opening supermarkets and churning out z-list celebrities are probably the only things that this country is good at any more.’
On the other side of the world, Luke Osgood swallowed the last worm and raised his arms in triumph. ‘Will he win?’ Carlyle asked.
‘No,’ Helen said with certainty. ‘Gay ex-policeman is too niche to win. He’s also too middle-class. People like him are the ones who get halfway on shows like this: not complete losers who get voted straight off, but not popular enough with the masses to get through to the very end. To do that, you either have to be a cheeky chappy soap star who gets the mums’ vote or a model with big boobs and a tiny bikini who gets the lads’ vote.’ She mentioned the names of a couple of people that Carlyle had never heard of. ‘One of those two will win.’
As they watched Osgood return to his jungle camp in triumph, Alice appeared in the doorway. She deftly tossed a mobile towards the sofa and retreated to her bedroom without saying a word. Carlyle caught the phone before it hit him on the head. He felt it vibrating in his hand and automatically hit the receive button. ‘Hello?’
‘Inspector, it’s Amelia Jacobs.’
Shit. He could immediately tell from the tension in her voice that it wasn’t good news. ‘Hi.’
‘That bastard’s taken Jake.’
That bastard. Michael Hagger. The bloke he was supposed to talk to. The bloke he was supposed to sort out.
‘He picked him up from the nursery.’
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
‘I was ten minutes late,’ her voice cracked slightly, ‘and they were gone.’
‘Uhuh.’ The inspector kicked out at the coffee-table in frustration. You fucking idiot, he told himself, why didn’t you just warn the guy off? They were depending on you.
‘John?’ Helen gave him a quizzical look but he just shook his head.
‘It’s been on the TV,’ Amelia continued.
Not the kind of stuff we’ve been watching, Carlyle thought angrily.
‘On the news,’ she explained.
‘Yes.’
‘God knows what will happen to that poor boy. You’ve got to get him back.’
He took a moment to compose himself. ‘Who’s in charge of trying to find him?’ Amelia gave him a name. ‘Okay,’ Carlyle sighed, ‘I’ll have a word and see what I can find out.’
‘You were supposed to have a word with Michael,’ she snapped.
‘I know, I know, I know,’ he said sharply. ‘Let me see what I can do. I will get back to you asap. Sit tight. It will be okay.’ Not waiting for a reply, he ended the call.
‘What’s the matter?’ Helen asked.
‘The matter is,’ he groaned, ‘I’ve fucked up.’ As he said it, the mobile started vibrating again in his hand. ‘Shit!’ He lifted the handset to his ear. ‘Amelia…’ He tried not to sound too exasperated.
‘Inspector Carlyle?’
Carlyle recognised the voice and his heart sank even further. For the second time in less than five minutes, he should have let the call go to voicemail. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s Rosanna Snowdon.’
Snowdon was a presenter on the local BBC News in London. Their paths had crossed on a previous case and Carlyle owed her a favour, maybe more than one, after she had introduced him to the politician Edgar Carlton. Two years earlier, when he had still been the Leader of the Opposition, Carlton had been caught up in a nasty little case involving rape and murder. Snowdon, a family friend of the Carltons, had facilitated an introduction for Carlyle. Later, when the whole thing had come to a messy, inconclusive end, she had probably saved what remained of Edgar’s career by stopping him from trying to air the story in the media.
Largely untouched by any hint of scandal, Carlton had gone on to become Prime Minister after a landslide election victory. Snowdon, meanwhile, was building her media career at a steady rate. As well as the local news, she now presented a weekly show called London Crime, which did reconstructions of unresolved cases around the capital and appealed to the public for help in solving them. A few months earlier, the show had featured one of Carlyle’s cases, a particularly vicious mugging of a young mother in Lincoln’s Inn Fields which had been linked to a series of other attacks in and around the Holborn area. Snowdon had asked Carlyle to come on the show, but he felt embarrassed about begging for people’s help on television, and had sent Joe instead. The piece generated seventy phone calls and no sensible leads. The amount of police time that had been wasted as a result was too big for Carlyle to even think about trying to calculate it.
The case, of course, remained unsolved.
Carlyle was extremely uncomfortable about owing Snowdon a favour. As far as he was concerned, she was a user — a hustler who saw every item, every victim, as another step towards a celebrity presenter gig on national television, a rich banker husband and regular exposure in Hello magazine. But, however he felt about it, owe her he certainly did.
‘How are you?’ he asked, trying to inject some interest into his voice.
‘I wondered if I could talk to you about something,’ she said, not bothering with any preamble. ‘Maybe we could have a coffee together?’
‘This is not about the Mills case, is it?’ Carlyle enquired cautiously. He hadn’t seen it in the press yet, but it was only a matter of time.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. What’s it about, then?’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said rather brusquely, ‘it’s not about any of your cases. But I’d rather we talked face to face. Could you do nine o’clock tomorrow morning?’
Carlyle sucked in a breath. He was curious to find out what was causing Rosanna such concern. Whatever it was, it would doubtless be more diverting than his rather banal domestic slaying. On the other hand, she didn’t pay his wages, and he did have to get Henry Mills processed. ‘That would be tricky,’ he said finally. ‘Now is not a great time.’
‘Please,’ she said firmly, ‘it’s really quite important. It will only take half an hour and it would be a really big favour.’ There was a genuine nervousness in her tone that he had never heard before. This was not the usual flirtatious Rosanna, the one that made him feel so uncomfortable. Stripped of its usual coating of ironic detachment, her voice sounded strained. Compared to the super-assured alpha female that he was used to, it was almost endearing.
‘Well…’ His interest was aroused. She might be playing him along, but he didn’t think so. If nothing else, this could wipe the slate clean between them. Carlyle reflected for a moment. ‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘Nine thirty.’
‘Fantastic!’ she said with obvious feeling. ‘How about we go to Patisserie Valerie on Marylebone High Street?’
‘Fine,’ he said, heartened slightly by the prospect that he might at least get a good pastry out of it.
‘Good, I’ll see you there. Have a pleasant evening, Inspector.’
‘You too.’ Carlyle clicked off the phone and glanced at Helen, who was still engrossed in her television show. Luke Osgood was now dancing around his jungle clearing, wearing nothing but a yellow posing pouch and a red cowboy hat. He had a bottle of wine in one hand and a cigar in the other. Whatever else Luke has had done recently, Carlyle thought, he hasn’t yet coughed up for any liposuction. Disgusted, he pushed himself off the sofa and fled the room.
For almost two hours, he lay in bed, racing through the final hundred or so pages of an excellent detective novel by an Italian writer, whose hero found himself fighting his way through the mire of ‘corruption, fraud, rackets and villainy’ with mixed success. Carlyle enjoyed it immensely. Finishing the last page, he closed the book and let it fall on the bedside table with a satisfying thud. Books like that should be required reading in schools, he thought. They should be thrust into the hands of the so-called literary experts who imagined that crime novels were just convoluted puzzles. Yawning, he stretched out under the duvet. For a short while, he enjoyed the luxury of letting his mind go blank, while staring at the ceiling. Then, giving up on any hope of his wife’s imminent arrival, he switched off the light and prepared to dream of villains and villainy.
Draining the last dregs from his 750 ml bottle of Tiger beer, Jerome Sullivan nodded his head in time to the beat of T.I.’s ‘Dead and Gone’, grinning serenely, despite the music playing so loudly that the windows were shaking. No one within half a mile of his flat could possibly be getting any sleep, but the neighbours knew better than to complain. Jerome was not good with criticism. The last person to complain about his anti-social behaviour had ended up in the Royal Free Hospital with two broken legs.
Running his operations out of the bunker-like Goodwin House, the thirty-one year old was the biggest skunk and ecstasy dealer in the N5, N7, NW5 and NW1 postcodes. The 1980s four-storey, brown-brick building was perfectly designed for his business operations. It was almost as if Camden Council had built it to order. It even looked like a fortress. The windows were small and at least twenty feet off the ground. More importantly, there was only one way in; even that was on foot — there was no vehicle access. Seeing its potential, Jerome had appropriated the top two floors and set about strengthening the building’s defences, so that if the police ever tried to raid it, it would take them at least two hours to get in. Short of bringing a Challenger tank down Marsden Street and pumping a couple of 120 mm rounds into the building, number 47 was impregnable.
Tossing the empty beer bottle onto the sofa, Jerome felt a sudden wave of boredom sweep over him. Reaching for his new toy lying on the coffee-table, he staggered to his feet and kicked at a couple of the bodies slumped on the floor. ‘Get up!’ he shouted over the music. ‘Let’s go up on the roof.’
Two minutes later, he was waving a Glock 17 above his head as he swayed to the music blasting through the asphalt below his bare feet. The 9 mm semi-automatic pistol had arrived earlier in the day, a present from a happy supplier; a reward for Jerome beating his sales targets for the first quarter of the year. The supplier — an Albanian people-trafficker who was diversifying into drugs — had thrown in a couple of clips of ammunition as well. Jerome hadn’t realised that he had any sales targets, quarterly or otherwise, but he was delighted by the gift. He had never owned a gun before, and he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it.
But he knew he would do something.
By his standards, Jerome had been giving it some serious thought. The way he saw it, there was no point in having the gun, if you didn’t use it to shoot someone. But who? For the moment, however, just holding it was enough. Wearing just a Nickelback T-shirt and a pair of ruby Adidas running shorts, he shivered in the night air. In the semi-darkness above the orange street lights he could see the goosebumps on his arms, but the cold was overridden by the overwhelming sense of power flowing from the Glock as he gripped it tightly in his hand. Sticking his free hand down his trousers, he gave his balls a vigorous scratch and felt a tingling in his groin. The Glock was giving him a chubby all right, and he hadn’t even fired it yet. ‘Oh man!’ he groaned to himself. ‘This has gotta happen, just gotta…’
Eric Christian, one of Jerome’s key associates, a friend since their second year at nearby Gospel Oak Primary School, stumbled through the doorway and on to the roof. He was followed by a couple of hangers-on who didn’t know the end of a party when they saw one. Eric looked at Jerome and grinned. ‘Careful you don’t walk right off the edge, man,’ he drawled, trying — and failing — to light a large blunt with a Harley-Davidson lighter.
‘No worries, dude,’ Jerome grinned. He brought the gun down to eye level, gripped it double-handed and pointed it at Eric.
Eric’s eyes widened as the blunt fell from his lips. ‘Whoa, maaaan!’ he drawled, trying to keep the nervous laugh out of his voice. ‘Tell me that thing’s not loaded.’
‘Nah.’ Jerome’s eyes lost their focus. He pulled the gun to his chest and pointed the barrel skyward, like a man about to participate in an old-style duel. ‘I took the clip out before. It’s downstairs somewhere.’
The music beneath them reached a crescendo. Starting to dance again, Jerome pointed the Glock past Eric at the other two guys who had joined them. He remembered them now. They were pondlife: sometimes they did little jobs for him, sometimes they were customers. Both of them looked like they were going to shit themselves; one even stuck his hands up, like they did in the movies. Jerome thought this was hilarious and burst out laughing, thinking that if the gun were loaded, he might just pull the trigger. He turned back to Eric. ‘We’ll have to try it out soon, though.’
‘Sure thing,’ said Eric, laughing too. Pulling a mobile out of his back pocket, he began filming his friend. Panning across the roof, he zoomed in on Jerome before focusing on the Glock. ‘Go for it, man. Let’s make a movie!’
Jerome shrieked with delight. ‘This one’s for YouTube,’ he shouted at the tiny camera. ‘Comin’ to get ya, baby!’
‘You the man, Jerome,’ shouted one of the losers.
‘I’m a killer, man!’ Jerome stepped closer to the camera and put the gun to his head, grinning like a maniac. ‘This is how you muthafuckin’ kill someone!’ he screamed, eyes blazing. ‘Just sqeeeeeze.’ His index finger jerked back the trigger. There was a muffled crack and his eyes rolled back into his head. For a second, time stood still. Then, still holding the gun, he did a little sideways dance before stepping off the side of the building and disappearing from view.
Eric stood there, the background hum of the late-night traffic in his ears, trying to work out how his mate had done such a cool trick.
‘Wow!’ said a voice behind him. ‘Did you get all that?’